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Pentagon to Allow Photos of Soldiers’ Coffins

WASHINGTON — In a reversal of an 18-year-old military policy that critics said was hiding the ultimate cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the news media will now be allowed to photograph the coffins of America’s war dead as their bodies are returned to the United States, but only if the families of the dead agree.

The decision, which Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced Thursday, lifts a 1991 blanket ban on such photographs put in place under President George Bush. It chiefly affects coffins arriving from Iraq and Afghanistan that go through Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

“I think that foremost in our thinking about issues like this should be the families and giving them choices,” Mr. Gates said in a news conference at the Pentagon.

Renewed as recently as a year ago by the administration of President George W. Bush, the ban has long been a source of intense debate.

The military said the ban protected the privacy and dignity of families of the dead. But others, including some of the families as well as opponents of the Iraq war, said it sanitized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and was intended to control public anger over the conflicts.

Mr. Gates, who said at the news conference that he was “never comfortable” with the ban, tried to have it overturned a year ago. But he said he encountered resistance in the Pentagon, and so he “demurred.”

But once President Obama said this month that he was reviewing the ban, Mr. Gates again sounded out senior officials at the Pentagon.

“I’ll be perfectly honest,” Mr. Gates said. “There was a division in the building.”

But, he added, a “very compelling” memorandum from the Army in favor of changing the policy was persuasive, particularly since the Army accounts for most of the war dead in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr. Gates said he came to the conclusion that “we should not presume to make the decision for the families; we should actually let them make it.”

Under the new policy, photographs will not be permitted of coffins if the families say no. The policy is similar to one in place for funerals at Arlington National Cemetery.

Reaction to the change from both sides was swift.

“I’m very disappointed,” said John Ellsworth, the president of Military Families United, whose son, Lance Cpl. Justin Ellsworth, was killed in Iraq in 2004 at age 20. “There was nothing wrong with the way things were. I believe that the administration basically caved to the special-interest groups, the antiwar groups, that are going to politicize our fallen.”

Jon Soltz, the chairman of VoteVets.org, an anti-Iraq war group that says it has 15,000 military families as members, said he was pleased with the decision.

“So many Americans want to have Memorial Day once a year when they go to the beach and cook hot dogs in the backyard,” Mr. Soltz said. “This is a way for Americans to see and honor the sacrifice of our fallen when it occurs. It’s something our public should be aware of.”

Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, introduced a measure in 2004 to try to lift the ban. Mr. Lautenberg commended Mr. Gates’s decision, saying in a statement that “we should honor, not hide, flag-draped coffins.”

News organizations also praised the change in policy. “The public has a right to see and to know what their military is doing, and they have a right to see the cost of that military action,” said Santiago Lyon, the director of photography for The Associated Press. “I think what we had before was a form of censorship.”

Nearly 5,000 members of the military and Defense Department civilians have died in the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Pentagon — 4,253 in Iraq and 652 in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan.

The original 1991 ban had its genesis in an embarrassment for the first President Bush.

In 1989, the television networks showed split-screen images of Mr. Bush sparring and joking with reporters on one side and a military honor guard unloading coffins from a military action that he had ordered in Panama on the other.

Mr. Bush, a World War II veteran, was caught unaware and subsequently asked the networks to warn the White House when they planned to use split screens. The networks declined.

At the next opportunity, in February 1991 during the Persian Gulf war, the Pentagon banned photos of returning coffins.